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this feeling of satori I had in my slumber—
the world hasn't decided
—and find it funny. My subconscious, it seems, is rather enamored of Jack's delusion.
    I'll shake it off, of course. I'll look in the mirror at my horns and wings, my reassuringly human eyes, and all will be right with the world. Jack's psychosis is just that—psychosis. It's strange that in these other folds he has imagined for the two of them Puck dies; it jars with the usual pattern of denial delusions; but I'll figure it out in time, as we carry on our sessions.
    I don't realize that more dreams like this will come, more frequent, more intense, over the next few weeks, until I am no longer sure that they are dreams at all.
    “I think you know I'm right,” says Jack. “You're just not willing to take the plunge yet. You're just not willing to admit it.”
    “So you're saying
that you're
sane? It's the rest of us who're crazy?”
    He shrugs, grins.
    “One of the folds I knew Puck in—Endhaven—it had these windmills up on a hill outside of town. He told me once he used to imagine they were giants when he was a kid and I said, well, you know, they might be. It's like Don Quixote… but like in that movie where what's-his-face thinks he's Sherlock Holmes in 1970sNew York. George C. Scott. He says to his shrink, you know, maybe Quixote was right. They might just be windmills. But they might be giants. I think maybe they're both. Maybe the world hasn't decided yet. They could—what's up?”
    My pen is stopped over my notepad.
The world hasn't decided yet.
My jaw may not be literally dropped, but the shock of the synchronicity is clearly showing on my face. I shake my head, try to laugh it off.
    “Nothing,” I say.
    That night I have another dream.
INSANITY IS A CITY
    Insanity is a city, he thinks, a haunting, hounding maze of monsters given stone flesh. Madness made real. Angels rumbling with demons. Gods with wings of steel sweeping down out of the skies to scatter humanity to dust.
    He staggers out of the alley, coat gripped closed with whiteknuckled hands. Behind him, the angel's screams are dying into a gurgle of blood in a throat, drowning in the baying of the mob. Insanity is a city, he thinks.
    He walks down cobbled streets, through shaded courtyards, wide plazas of marble flagstones with stone benches and ornamental fountains, barren trees and snow-mantled statues. There are tram stops, bus stops, but he has no money for this fold, so he just watches where the rattling dinosaur-machines go lumbering, and follows the ones whose frontboards proclaim Stadde Cintrale, until he reaches what may or may not be the city center with its shops and arcades, pedestrian precincts, a tourist center with racks of maps and bus routes. He picks up one of each—thirty, forty of them—filling his pockets with numbered trails that snake through this district or that quarter. All he wants is to find somewhere he feels safe. He has nothing here but the clothes on his back and a book whose only purpose now is to carry the reminder of his name, scrawled on its frontispiece.
    He clutches the Book of All Hours to his chest, his last connection with his own identity.
    It used to be a book of maps, he's sure. He's sure he can remember a time when it was a book of maps, each turned page showing the world at an exponentially increasing scale—streets, cities, countries, continents, and larger still, impossibly larger, vast fields of reality like the surface of some gas giant, page after page scaling up to inconceivable distances. A guidebook to eternity, to the Vellum.
    He remembers graving human lives as glyphs upon its parchment.
    He remembers cramming its yellowed surface with sigils that crawled across the page even as the people that they marked moved through their daily lives.
    He remembers these gravings multiplying into a storm of ink, obscuring the terrain drawn underneath, skittering here and there as if they sought to tell, in combination, some strange,